Total Biff

Thirty of the thirty-three entries have now seen action, and the table is starting to take shape (see previous post). The holdouts are Skeeve, (who is planning on a second-half of the season campaign), OverGoalify (who has made a few selections, but none yet in the leagues covered) and TFA's Euro Draws, which will likely have selections at some point in the not too distant future.

One observation is that the net total is in profit, as are 18 of the 30 who have made selections to date. It suggests that the standard of competition this season is much higher than before! 20.90 points from 844 settled bets, an ROI of 2.47%. When you consider that with a little effort, most of the prices recorded against can be beaten, that's a decent return.

The table is really in thirds - three of them strangely enough. The top third are the in profit my more than a point, the bottom third who are losing by more than a point, and the middle third comprised of three anal-retentive holdouts plus those who haven't strayed far from zero yet.

BettingTools.co.uk (-1.72) and Fulltimebettingblog (-0.33) both made small losses but continue to lead the way with Fairfranco (+5.99) storming into third place.

Bundeslayga (+2.53) marched steadily into fourth place ahead of Draw Picks (-3.12) in fifth.

Randolph (+2.28) moves up to sixth, Drawmaster (+0.47) dropped one place to seventh, a whole 0.01 point ahead of XX Draws (+4.98) in eighth. It's been a good season so far for draws apparently.

Sjosta (+5.22) made a big move up to ninth from negative territory, Gecko made 4.17 with his debut selections and is tenth, Mountain Mouse made another 1.84, Jamie A lost 2.70 points (I think – I usually mess up his numbers somewhere, and he always points out where).

Daily 25 made 1.49 with his first selection, bettering the Football Investor (Bounty entry) who made 0.49 with his opening shots, and Ian Erskine who made 0.46 points with his.

Club Havana was up 1.85, TFA_Raz lost 2.08 and XX Unders was up 0.84 to make up the top eighteen profitable entries. Club Havana and XX Unders both emerged out of the red this weekend.

The dirty dozen currently letting the side down by being negative at this stage are led by Mortimer who made 1.38 points which, I would just like to point out, was an average gain of 0.017 points per bet! 

"Mortimer," Randolph says, "We're back in business!"

Next is Football Elite (Bounty, idle) and The Football Analyst’s Draw (Bounty) entry which lost 1.00 point on their debut. Cassini Value made 0.98 points, Trend to end made 0.41 points, Betcast was idle and Rubicon made 1.76.

Online Trader was up 0.45, Abromo down 1.10 and Talkies Tips lost 0.69. Paul Watson lost 2.87 while @ValueBankFooty was idle.

The 81 selections took a few minutes, and while it wasn’t hugely onerous, it’s not something I want to repeat in a hurry. Thanks for the emails and comments of support, including one from the guilty party, but it is not his fault for taking advantage of an apparent loophole, rather mine for not limiting entries before. 

Jamie A, quite correctly, pointed out:

I did try to warn you about the lay prices!

I'm happy with people making as many selections as they like as surely the more instances of perceived value you have the higher the likelihood that your perception of value is wrong.

But then again i'm not doing the admin.

If I had a method that picked that many selections which were value I wouldn't be part of the FTL at all as I would spend all my time calculating trying to get bets on & applying the same method to as many leagues as possible.

I do think you should make it so that everybody has to submit their bets in a specified format (using football-data team names for example) so the admin is kept to a minimum.

Indeed Jamie did warn me. Note to self: Stop messing up his numbers, and listen to what he has to say.

Jason suggests an award would be appropriate:

The admin sounds like a nightmare. I run a horse racing tipster competition at High Class Equine, both paid and free entry, in a winner-takes-all prize and small win if a free entrant wins. Luckily we have just a small group of about 15 tipsters and one selection each Saturday, so manageable.However, it can be time consuming and if by chance a number of new entrants arrived I would quickly shut the door.

There are only so many hours in a day.

I can imagine the look on your face when 94 entries arrived.

You deserve a medal.

I certainly won't be adding to the 33 entries already in! And then Lazy trader had this to say:

You need to automate things especially if you use things like Football data's csv files for results etc. Shouldn't be the hardest thing in the world to set up a webpage that'd gather all matches etc

I used to use football data's files to do everything from the upcoming matches and results/odds.

Where/what do you currently use for the matches/results/odds at the moment I'll see if I can tweak my code to cobble something together.

I'll take a rain check on that kind offer for now. I think with the limit of around 25 maximum per entry it should be quite manageable, but if the FTL idea were to get any bigger, some automated / standardised format would be a must.

We move on.

An administrative detail is that following next weekend, I will make the group assignments made for the Erskine Cup. I am aware that the following midweek sees a number of the top leagues in action, but I want to give myself time to publish the Groups and opening matchups (to be played on the weekend of 27th) and also time to update my Elo ratings and send out selections for subscribers. Last week was a good one in every category, and I don't want to be a total biff just as we are getting hot.

Here is how Group A would be comprised were the allocation to be made today:

The four players will pair-off on the three dates shown, as indicated by the colours (blue plays blue) and the better entry will get 3 points. 1 point each if there’s a tie, and the tie-breaker after three matches will be the actual point profit.

The end of September marks the first of the ‘monthly’ (August/September) prizes worth £25 courtesy of Betcast. David runs bettingwebsites.org and has a number of trading Betcast Podcasts. I erroneously told you previously that David was from Australia. He must have gone up at the end of his sentence, because he is actually UK based. I’m not sure there are too many worse insults in life than being called Australian, so I am very, very sorry David …. (like that Steve M? Right back at ya')

While I rather missed @ValueBankFooty’s acca selection this weekend, so did Marc, writing:

Valuebank footy is a total biff, as he forgot to email for the second week running - This week costing me a 10.6pt profit. That said, what goes around comes around as last week would have seen a 7.35pt loss, so not all bad but selective memory in forgetting last week and remembering this would have been a nice break - Reminders set everywhere now - and I am looking forward to a midweek thrash out and landing a nice little acca.

I actually had no idea what a "total biff" was, but I have learned something new. Not often that happens these days. 

There are a number of selections already in for the midweek matches, including this five Home Team accumulator from Banky: 

SWINDON - READING - NOTTINGHAM FOREST - YORK - BURY. 

Before risking everything, bear in mind that @ValueBankFooty is currently 1.06 points adrift of Erskine Cup qualification in 33rd place, which simply means that he's due...

And I'm sorry Betcast, but Champions League games are not part of the FTL due to the absence of any official recorded prices. Football Data do not cover these matches. For anyone interested, David was looking for an away win for Atlético Madrid (@ Olympiakos).